If sports media is good at one thing, it’s creating a straw man argument.
And boy, have we seen our fair share of that in the immediate aftermath of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. After four days of competition, the Sweet 16 has sorted itself out, and there’s one person that seems to be missing from this year’s ball: Cinderella.
Alas, no seed greater than 10 has made the round of 16 this season, much to the chagrin of sports pundits ready to dig March Madness its grave for lacking its titular “madness.”
Chief among those pundits is ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, who claimed on Monday’s edition of First Take that this year’s lack of upsets will be the “death” of March Madness.
“If this continues, it will be the death of college basketball.” 😯@stephenasmith weighs in on college basketball not having Cinderella teams pic.twitter.com/Km2HlCCjRv
— First Take (@FirstTake) March 24, 2025
I’m here to tell you, Stephen A., that March Madness will be just fine without its Cinderella. In fact, it’ll probably be even better.
Now, it’s pretty easy to make a purely basketball argument for this case. After all, the best teams playing against each other should result in a higher-quality game, right? And to take it a step further, it’s logical to believe that NIL and the transfer portal have more efficiently distributed talent across teams, making for more competitive games, right?
But that conjecture isn’t even necessary to debunk Stephen A.’s argument. It’s easily refuted by simply looking at the data.
More people watch the game when the best teams play each other in the NCAA Tournament (i.e., the one-, two-, and three-seeds). When a Cinderella advances far into the NCAA Tournament, fewer people watch.
This is partly because an uneven matchup between a blue blood and Cinderella generally results in a less competitive game, meaning fewer people stay watching throughout. But it’s also because Cinderella lacks the history and familiarity inherent in a blue blood program.
Take this from a college football perspective, for instance. Is someone likelier to watch a College Football Playoff game between Alabama and Michigan or Ohio State and North Texas? The answer is obvious, but let’s look at some data anyway, courtesy of Sports Media Watch.
Last year’s Final Four featured a Cinderella of sorts. NC State, an 11-seed, played eventual national runners-up Purdue. That game drew 2.67 million fewer viewers than the other national semifinal that day, UConn-Alabama.
Two years ago, San Diego State and Florida Atlantic met in the Final Four and drew about one million fewer viewers than UConn and Miami that same day.
The last extreme Cinderella example, Saint Peter’s run to the Elite Eight in 2022, ended in a 20-point blowout loss to UNC, a game that was the least-watched late Sunday Elite Eight game since 2016.
Contrarily, when blue bloods square off late in the tournament, the ratings are tremendous.
Look no further than in 2022 when the Final Four consisted of Duke, UNC, Kansas, and Villanova. Both the Duke-UNC semifinal and the Kansas-UNC championship game averaged audiences greater than 17 million viewers, a figure that a men’s tournament audience hasn’t eclipsed since.
Or, by another measure, how about the three times since 2012 in which three of the four teams in the Final Four have been one-seeds? In those three seasons (2012, 2015, and 2018), the average audience for the Final Four and championship games was 17.75 million viewers. In every other year, when the Final Four had two or fewer one-seeds, audiences averaged just 15.45 million.
Fans want to see the best teams compete against each other, period.
It’s why college football pundits argue ad nauseam every season about whether the best or most deserving teams should get into the playoffs. Watching the best teams play one another is much more entertaining than watching the most deserving teams play each other.
When the product you’re selling is competition, best-on-best sells.
That’s unfortunate for those who like to romanticize about Cinderellas in March. But truth be told, if television executives got their pick, they want one-seeds and traditional rivalries, not the MEAC Tournament champion.
And fans who vote with their remotes seem to want that, too.
